openSUSE 10.2 Alpha4 Released

Submitted by Ty on September 8, 2006 - 9:00am

I'm glad to announce the fourth alpha release of our openSUSE 10.2 distribution. The codename of openSUSE 10.2 is "Basilisk Lizard". With the rename of the distribution from SUSE Linux to openSUSE, we renamed also the name in bugzilla.novell.com so that you have to report bugs against "openSUSE 10.2".

Compared with Alpha4, we've made a number of significant changes:

* We switched to kernel 2.6.18rc5 - and use only SMP kernel, the default kernel is smp, the kernel-smp is now dropped. Now all kernel module packages (kmp) and the Xen packages have been adopted for the new kernel.

* KDE now uses the new kickoff menu.

* We switched to GNOME 2.16 Beta (2.15.92) and have now all packages in.

* The new branding "openSUSE" should be shown in all places. Any SUSE Linux 10.1 branding is worth a bug report.

* Finished integration of X11 R7.1.

* Further refinement of patterns used in the package manager for grouping of software. Please look at them and discuss the contents on the opensuse-factory mailing list.

* Start of removal of unneeded SuSEconfig scripts

* No reboot after CD1, displaying of the slideshow during all media

* YaST runs during installation in a window (the background is blue, this will change to a nice wallpaper)

* Update of sysfsutils to 2.1.0, dbus to 0.92.

* integration of new tool pam-config and fixes to pam configuration.

* Further work on package management: Support for patch and delta RPMs in YaST online update (not yet in zmd), refactoring and improving of code.

* Option to install JFS in YaST again - as experimental, unsupported filesystem.

All these changes needed changes by other packages, so a lot of other packages have been fixed to build again (and updated), and a few still need updating.

All changes are shown on CD1 in the file ChangeLog.

Alphas of openSUSE are rather untested and more for the experimental folks. I do not suggest to use it in production. But I do consider especially Alpha4 an important milestone for development and testing and use it on my own Laptop.

WARNING: The current factory tree is not in sync with this release, please use the ISOs to install.